"Eighty percent of our identity as Kurds is in our music. If you are Kurdish today, even if you don't speek the language, you can hear a song in Kurdish, and your soul roars."

"/.../ many Kurds of their generation they never learned their own mother tongue because it was stigmatized in schools. But they grew up hearing it in Kurdish music. Ms. Bogan said her own young children don't want to learn Kurdish because their Turkish classmates and teachers tell them Turkish is the only language that really matters, and after that English. "If you don't give prestige to a culture," she lamented, "people won't value it, and it will die."

"Music was for a long time the only semi-free zone for Kurds to express themselves in their own language in Turkey and also a kind of therapy," she elaborated. "When my grandmother is alone, I hear her singing about her past." Ms. baysal nodded. She has a grandmother too, she said, who sings at home. "My grandmother who turned 100 lately, doesn't speak a word of Turkish, and I don't know Kurdish. If you lose a language, you can lose your family, because you lose your link to the past. But when I ask my grandmother about her life 100 years ago she starts singing. It's how we communicate. "I put my hand on her knee." she said. "She sings. I may not be able to understand the words. But I can understand the feelings."